Data classes don't do runtime type checking, but they do provide dynamic type info through dataclasses.fields(). This function returns a tuple of Field objects, and according to the documentation[1], Field includes the attribute "type":

  type: The type of the field.

In Python 3.10, this now returns a string. In my opinion that's a bug (perhaps in the docs).

I verified this using a short test program:

  import dataclasses
  
  @dataclasses.dataclass
  class Apa:
      bepa: int
  
  first_field = dataclasses.fields(Apa)[0]
  print(type(first_field.type))

Running with 3.9 and 3.10:

  $ python test.py  # Python 3.9
  <class 'type'>
  $ python3.10 test.py
  <class 'str'>

1: https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/dataclasses.html#datacl...

That is indeed annoying. Thanks for the example.

The variable annotations are used at runtime to define the fields. They aren't type checked.